I'm going to talk today, this morning, about two people, Kant and Hegel.
Kant was the person that I think Ayn Rand is called the most evil person who ever existed.
I think a friend of mine told me she also referred to him once as the machine gunner of the mind.
I don't think, at least in his political philosophy, he should be treated in this way, actually had some ideas at any rate that were quite compatible with classical liberalism, although there are others that are somewhat more questionable.
Kant lived from 1720 to 1804. He had a very uneventful life. He spent his entire adult life in the city of Königsberg in East Prussia.
I think he once visited a neighboring city for a short time, but that was the extent of his travels.
He did have, though, from his reading, a detailed knowledge of all the cities in Europe, and he would have at his house a dinner party every night, and he would have conversations on all sorts of things with people who attended.
He was famous for his very regular habits. He believed in having rules for everything. Annette Beier has a very funny essay on Kant, where she points out that he thought there was some special method of walking that was more healthy, where you would raise your feet off the ground when you walked, and he was very careful to do that whenever he walked.
I mentioned throughout the series of lectures, I referred to Straussian interpretations, where the Straussians contend there is a secret or hidden meaning in the text.
And the philosophers write in a very careful way to conceal their true message.
Now, Kant actually had one statement in which he admits himself that he wrote in this way.
This is sort of not, he's admitting that he was very careful.
The episode was this, Kant's views on religion were quite unorthodox, although he believed
He didn't God, at least he said he did, and he had arguments for the existence of God.
He didn't accept the orthodox Lutheran teachings of the Prussian state.
So under the Prussian King Frederick William II, the Minister of Education was a man called
Boehm, he had the king send Kant an order not to write anything on the subject of religion.
Kant's views were too controversial. So, Kant replied, as your majesty's faithful servant,
I will, of course, obey and not write anything. But when Frederick William II died, he was
replaced by Frederick William III, Kant felt free to write about religion, and he did.
He can't point out the reason he wasn't bound, he felt he wasn't bound by his promise not to write about religion,
was he'd said, as your majesty's faithful servant.
So he felt he worded it in a very tricky way that this meant the promise was made just to that king, so he wasn't bound anymore by it.
So, this is an example of one case where there is very careful writing.
Just in passing, as I mentioned Straussian, the Straussian interpretation of Kant is,
of course, that he's basically a Hobbesian, and also the Kantians believe that the metaphysics
Metaphysics and Epistemology really is just window dressing, what he was really interested
in was political philosophy, the other stuff is just a bit added extra.
Now in political philosophy there are two main works that I'll be considering, the first
The first one is the first part, part one of the metaphysics and morals and also a short book that Kant wrote called Perpetual Peace.
But before I go into that, I want to say a little bit about Kant's ethical theory because we need to understand this in order to understand the political philosophy.
In ethical statements, there's a statement saying we ought to do something, we ought to respect other people's rights, we ought not to steal.
And any statement ought something telling us what to do, an imperative.
We can distinguish two different kinds of imperatives.
Hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives.
A hypothetical imperative is one that says,
if you want such and such, if you have a certain goal, you should do this.
If you want to be healthy, you should eat nutritious food and exercise.
That isn't saying you should unconditionally eat nutritious food and exercise.
If you want that goal, then you should do this.
This kind of, this is accepted by everybody thinks this is quite, there's nothing strange about this.
Everybody accepts this is a valid way of looking at imperatives. They're all, an imperative is how you achieve a goal.
Goal. Now, within this hypothetical imperative, there is a special class, which is called
an ascertoric imperative. Remember, hypothetical imperative is, if you want this, you should
If you want such and such, you should do this. Now supposing, in fact, everybody does want something, then you have an esoteric imperative.
It's hypothetical because it still states a goal. It's if you want this, then here's what to do.
do but everybody does want it so you can in effect drop out the if part of the
sentence because everybody does want it and Kant thought that there was such an
ascetoric imperative that obtains namely he thought everybody wants his or her
own happiness this is a psychological law we're all aimed at our own happiness
So if you have an imperative that if you want to be happy, if you want a happy life, you
should do such and such, if that's correct, if those things are in fact needed to lead
a happy life, then everybody would have reason to do them.
So that is the hypothetical imperative.
Now, the controversial type of imperative is the second class, the categorical imperative.
Now, this is an imperative that just says, do such and such, or you ought to do this.
There is no goal stated.
It's not in order to achieve this, you ought to do that.
It's do this.
So Kant thought that he could show by reason that there are such categorical imperatives.
There is a categorical imperative of different versions, but now there was a famous article
that came out published in the Philosophical Review in 1972 by Philippa Foote, a famous
British philosopher, who was also the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, called morality as a
system of hypothetical imperatives, and she argued that the notion of a categorical imperative
in concept really doesn't make sense.
We can certainly have statements of the form do such and such.
Suppose I say, in chess you can't move, if your king is in check you have to move it.
So I say, you must move your king if it's in check.
Well, that isn't, I've told you something you must do, but you have no reason to accept
what I'm saying unless you're playing chess or you want to follow the rules of chess.
So her point was, we can certainly state categorical imperative, we can state, we can make imperatives
without giving any hypothetical that starts them off, any if-clause saying why you should
do that.
But unless there's one that's presumed, then no one has a reason to do it.
You would just have a statement, I'm saying, while I say, everyone take out your wallet
and give me all your money.
I hope everybody does that but you have no reason to do it. I mean just so her argument
was just that because you've stated a categorical statement that doesn't, it kind of hasn't
shown that anyone has any reason to follow any categorical statement that she thought
only hypothetical imperatives give someone a reason to do something.
I think to see though what Kant had in mind, I think we could start off by a simpler example
of one he used.
I'm supposing we say you shouldn't have contradictory goals.
Contradictory goals mean ones that can't be realized at the same time.
Like I say, suppose I say you can't both want to diet and eat whatever you want at the same time.
So I think one could argue this is just a demand of reason.
It isn't that there's no hypothetical involved.
about just a demand of reason that we not have desires of this contradictory kind.
And what Kant was doing when he talked about categorical comparatives, he thought you could
get more out of reason than that, just avoiding contradictory demands.
He thought there was, that you could, he thought reason had, we could learn more from reason
than just this example.
For example, the famous first version of the categorical comparative, you take the maxim of your action, that's to say, maxim is a description of what you're doing, stating what you intend in doing that action.
If you couldn't will that everyone do this action, then you would be violating reasoning.
For example, he gives this example when people have disputed whether it would lead to a contradiction
of the kind he said.
He said, supposing I promise, say, to give somebody some money, I mean, in an emergency,
I borrow some money from someone in an emergency, and I promise to give it back to him, and
I intend that, I don't intend actually to give it back to him.
So Kant said, well, could I will that everyone follow that maxim, and he said no, because
then if everybody did that, people would knew about this and no one would ever believe such
such a promise, so the institution of promising, at least promises of that kind, would break
down, so I would be contradicting myself if I made a promise of that kind.
There are all sorts of complications in what the different kinds of contradictions are,
but this is the basic idea, so Kant thought we could get, just by reason, we could get
categorical demands on what we should do, so our demands are not just limited to hypothetical.
I want to just, before I turn from Kant's ethics to go into the political philosophy,
I just want to add sort of a speculative idea. If Kant is right on what he says about the
and the Asiaturic Imperative.
Everybody wants to achieve his or her own happiness.
Now supposing one finds plausible
an Aristotelian account of how you achieve your happiness,
then you could take the Categorical Imperative
as just saying if this Aristotelian program
is universalizable, and you could take, you could really, all content, sort of standard
content ethics really drops out, and all you'd be saying is, if Kant is right, is that everybody
has to follow the Aristotelian program, because we have the Assetoric Imperative, everybody
wants to do this, plus this is consistent, fulfills the universalizability maxim, so
everyone's under an ethical obligation to do it so you could get
kind of a content argument for Aristotelianism
that way. You'd be adding to the Aristotelian program
that not only is this the desirable way to live
but it's obligatory. But as I say, this is just a
speculative idea.
Now, in Kant's view of ethics, he places a great deal of stress on the will, that is to say, the motive that you have in acting, much more than the results of what you act.
He said the only thing that is entirely good in itself is the will to do good.
So in, let's say, supposing in the Kantian, in Kant's view, supposing that I see somebody, say a friend of mine is very sick and I decide to help him out or take care of him
I serve him because I'm very attached to this person, I'm distressed by his being sick and I want to help him.
Have I done anything morally valuable?
No, my actions don't have any moral merit.
They would have moral merit only if I acted from duty,
only if I said, well, I'm helping him because I ought to do so,
This doesn't mean that I couldn't have affectionate feelings for my friend at the same time, but
that can't be the reason I do it, if what I'm doing is to have moral merit.
You see a very austere doctrine.
You get moral merit for things only if you act from duty.
Now we could, we might expect, and here we'd be surprised, that if someone holds this view,
we might think that in politics they stress very much acting from the right motive.
People need to act in an ethical way from the correct motive.
But Kant doesn't take this position at all.
Quite the contrary, he says that in politics, we're concerned only with external actions.
We're not concerned with what the motives people have. Politics is purely an external
matter. We're concerned, say, supposing I owe you some money, I have a legal obligation
and to pay you back, the legal system is concerned only with, do I pay you the money? If I paid
you the money just because I'm afraid I'll be arrested if I don't, if I didn't or sued
if I didn't, then I wouldn't be acting from an ethical motive in the Kantian way. I wouldn't
be acting because I ought to pay you back the money, but still that suffices from the
from the standpoint of the state, all that counts is external action.
So this is, remember I mentioned this in the lecture on Aquinas, Aquinas holds a similar
position and this is a basic idea in classical liberalism that the sphere of coercive action,
The only case in which you can act coercively to someone involve violations of rights.
You can't act to secure any other ethical goals.
You can't, supposing you hold, say, that certain types of sexual conduct are immoral, then
in the classical liberal view, you can't prevent people from doing that unless they're
The Contian classical liberal idea is completely going against the view that's held, say, by some traditionalist conservatives who say there can't be a right to do wrong.
Traditionalist conservatives say there can't be a right to do wrong, you can't have a right to do something that's ethically wrong.
Well, in the Kantian view, classical liberal view, this would be a confused statement.
And it can't, it's certainly true that it can't be right, it can't be ethically correct
to do something that's wrong, but it certainly makes sense to say that someone has a sphere
of action in which he's free to choose what to do, and it's wrong to coerce him within
that sphere, and in that sphere of action he might choose to do something that's wrong.
You say people should be free to have the religious beliefs they want, but that's perfectly consistent with saying that people might be ethically wrong to adopt certain religious beliefs.
So, very important in this view that action, the state politics is concerned only with
external action.
Kant, in saying that politics is concerned with external action, didn't at all abandon
is the basic point in his ethical theory where he's concerned with universalizability.
He was still, he's still a key issue for him is what rules can be universalized.
Just as in ethics he's saying we have to see what can the maximum of our action be adopted
as a universal law.
Here he said, in policy he said, can the laws we propose be universally applied, but he's
not concerned with motives.
Now in adopting this view of the importance of universalizability, can our legal proposed
laws be universalized?
Rothbard was very much influenced by Rousseau. He had an interpretation of Rousseau's general
will that makes it much less collectivist than Rousseau's own view of it. When Rousseau
said, remember, the general will, you imagine the whole community getting together and passing
Laws. Everyone just votes a certain way and then we see the result is what everybody,
the whole body has decided. Kant took that to mean that everyone, what each person should
do is to ask what laws could universally apply. So he's taking it in a much more individualistic
It isn't that everybody gets together and votes on measures that each person asks.
We ask what can be consistently made universal.
Kant mentioned when he discusses Rousseau, he said one thing he learned from Rousseau
is that reading Rousseau, not just a social contract, but his novels and Emile's work
on Education, in the novel Dealing with Education, he said we learn the value, he learned the
value of common people, he said before that he was inclined to think that only intellectuals
and philosophers himself really mattered, but after he read Rousseau he realized the
value of everyone, so he certainly interpreted Rousseau in a rather way much more compatible
with classical liberalism than I was inclined to suggest Rousseau himself held.
So he interpreted Rousseau in a way that got the best out of him, I think.
He also held that in taking this view on the importance of universalizability,
He felt he was modifying Plato in a certain way. Remember, Plato in the Republic ruled by the guardians, by the philosophers.
He thought that by talking about what can be universalized, where everybody would be acting according to universalizable maps,
He was making everybody, in effect, philosopher kings.
He's making the elitist view democratic.
It applies to everyone because everyone is acting through reason
and following these universal laws.
Now, when Kant applied this idea of, remember,
and politics were concerned with external action and we want laws that can be universalized.
So in considering how he applied this to property, he comes up in the first part of Metaphysics
and Morals with some quite libertarian views.
He says first of all, he said, we asked, do human beings have the right to acquire property?
And he says they obviously do because property, just physical objects that has, there's nothing
in property that would, that property can't have, land can't have rights by itself that
would prevent us from taking it over.
So human beings clearly have the right to act, to benefit themselves and they can appropriate
property.
Unlike Locke, Kant doesn't have any, he says we can just acquire property by taking it
into our possession.
He doesn't have any elaborate treatment of provisos, we can't let things spoil.
He just takes it as fairly obvious that we can, what we want to do is appropriate to
convert parts of the whole surface of the globe to our own use and he thinks it's desirable
that the whole surface of the globe be put to human use, so in his view there shouldn't
be any areas left over that aren't property.
Now a key point here is that this goes very much along with his notion that laws have
to be universalizable.
He says rights have to be what he calls, property rights, all rights include property rights,
This is a concept that Leibniz, who was a great German philosopher, stressed very much, and Kant was influenced by Leibniz to a great extent, although he broke with a lot of his philosophy.
What does impossibility mean? Well, ordinary possibility, I can ask, is something possible, like, is it possible that I'm giving a lecture now?
Well, yes it is, since I actually am giving a lecture, therefore it's possible that I am.
Now, is it possible, say, for any one of you to give a lecture, yes it is, say, you could
imagine one of you coming up and giving the lecture instead of me, much preferable state
of affairs to the present one.
But suppose I say, is it possible that at the same time you and I are giving the only
Lecture Now. No, this isn't possible. So, impossibility means two possibilities that can take place at the same time.
So, from the fact that A is possible and B is possible, it doesn't follow that A and B are compossible.
that has to be established on a case-by-case basis.
It does follow, if A and B come possible,
that A is possible and B is possible,
but the influence doesn't go the other way.
So Kant says it's a requirement of reason
that all rights become possible.
We can have to have all rights
capable of being exercised at the same time.
When he applies this to property, he gets some very interesting results.
He says, well, let's imagine that a group of people take land in a certain area into their possession.
So you have a number of people, each one is making a claim to a certain part of land.
Now, he thinks it's very likely that people have disputes about the various land claims.
One person will say, well, the proper principle of initial acquisition of land is such-and-such
that you mix your labor with it.
And somebody else will say, no, I think just saying that you want to have this part of
land is enough.
People have the same principle. You have all sorts of disputes. How far does your boundary go? Have you taken too much in your claim that it's unreasonable, that we should accept that you can own all that?
we can imagine all sorts of disputes about this so Kant thinks that because
we have these disputes there's no way people could figure out just by
reasoning what's the proper principle of initial acquisition how can we resolve
these we have to take the claims to property rights that people make in the
State of Nature, state of affairs where there's no authority saying how these questions should be settled.
Now take these claims as provisional. So people have property rights in the state of nature, but they're provisional because there are disputes about them.
I say, I own this room, and then Lew Rockwell says, no, you don't own this room. So we have a dispute about that.
So, if there is no legal authority, then my claims are provisional.
Now, here's where I think Kant makes an interesting point.
Remember, he thinks it's an imperative of reason that we have both property rights.
We can't just say we don't want to have property rights.
This would be not in the interest of human beings to do this.
Remember, we all have this esoteric imperative, want to live happy lives, we won't be able
The State is unable to do that unless we have property rights, but we want all the property to become possible, and we don't have that if we just have these provisional claims to rights, so Kant said, well, then we are under an imperative of reason to set up a state that will settle these questions and say what the boundaries of the rights are.
In doing that, can't just set aside the provisional claim rights that people have.
It has to just consider them all and kind of get them in a consistent form, try to solve
the coordination problem, so in that way we would have a set of composable rights.
So Kant says, really, from the notion of property rights, he thinks he can show that people
are under an imperative to set up a state.
I think, looking at his argument, his argument would have been better had he said people
are under an imperative to set up certain, to resolve this dispute, say, by agreeing
on some kind of common law code. I don't think he showed we have to have a state to do this, but you can see how this, at any rate, I think is a very interesting argument that he has.
Besides his work on property rights in the first part of Metaphysics and Moral, he also made a contribution to classical liberalism in his short book, 1795, called Perpetual Peace.
Here, he's extremely critical of war and colonialism. He doesn't like, he thinks these are very
bad institutions. And he calls, he said, in order to avoid war, we should have a federation
of the Various States of the Earth, where they would each agree not to engage in aggressive
war, and he doesn't want, contrary to what's sometimes supposed, he doesn't want a world
government.
He thinks this would be tyrannical if you had a single state that was ruling the entire
in the entire world.
But what he wants is a federation of states that would agree not to engage in war.
And he thinks that it's desirable that each of these states be a republic because he thinks
that in a republic, in order to go to war, you would need the permission of the people
in people that you couldn't then have the, say, a despot or a king just decide to go
to war because he thought it was in someone's, his interests or the nation's interests.
He thought if you needed popular consent for a war, then people would be unlikely to engage
in war.
This is the beginnings of what's called democratic peace theory.
This doesn't, I don't think his work, this theory has worked out entirely in practice
because the democratic states, the ones that have tended to be very warlike, if you look
at American foreign policy, it's certainly not one of pure pacifism, but Kant may have
have an answer to this because he could say what he believes in is not democracy, but
he has sort of what he thinks the best system is a republican system, which you don't have
direct rule by the people at all.
It's just there's sort of a popular consent to going to war, but he doesn't favor democracy,
so he's not really exactly saying this democratic peace theory.
His criticism of democracy, incidentally, is that direct democracy is unusual.
He says, well, if you have direct democracy, then it's supposed to be that all the people
are ruling, but in fact, some of the people, namely the ones in the minority, are not ruling.
So he thinks this is somehow a contradiction, that he's saying, well, you're supposed to
have direct rule by everybody but in fact some people don't agree.
I don't think this is a very good argument because in democracy you're not saying that
you want unanimous consent, but at any rate that's the argument he does give that argument.
Now I've mentioned two examples where I think Kant has made valuable contributions to classical
liberalism, his defense of property and his advocacy of a peaceful foreign policy.
But there is one area I think his views are quite a bit more questionable and here the
critics of Kant I think have a point against him.
He thought that resistance to the state is never justifiable, you can never illicitly
overthrow the government, revolutions are always out.
It's not clear, I find it a little unclear why he thought that, but that was his view.
Here I think we can see a tendency in his thought, both John Dewey and George Santayana
in their respective books on German philosophy pointed this out.
They were rather better critics of Kant, I think, than Ayn Rand.
They point out there's a tendency in Kant and other German thinkers to stress the inner
very much.
In ethics, Kant is concerned with the will, although he doesn't apply this to politics, but here the stress on the inner, talking about revolution, the stress on the inner returns, because he's thinking that even if the state does something that's very bad, you don't have to internally approve it, and if you don't, that's sufficient, you're not justified in taking action against the state
that would be acting in an, to act illegally is, according to him, always wrong. I think if you're
interested in looking at this issue further, Santayana's book called Egotism in German
Philosophy is very much worth reading. It's much, he had a much better style than John Dewey,
I won't mention Dewey's book, but I think Santayana's point is very much worth reading.
Now, as I say, Kant said revolution is never justifiable.
However, there's an odd consequence to this.
Supposing some people don't agree with Kant and they wage a successful revolution,
Revolution, then can you go to war against the revolutionary regime to restore the old
system?
Kant said, no, you can't, because then you'd be revolting against that government.
So something like revolution is always bad, but if it succeeds, then you can't change
that either.
so and in fact Kant was very enthusiastically in favor of the French
Revolution although he opposed some of the excesses such as the execution of
the King in January 1793 but he was a very much a supporter of the French
Revolution even though from his own theory he would have to say that the
revolutionary shouldn't have done what they did but once they did it that was
is all right. There's an interesting parallel, I think, with the views of a 20th century
libertarian, some you may know, Robert Lefebvre. Lefebvre thought that he had standard views,
say, that theft and aggression are wrong, but supposing someone steals something from
say while you're not looking he just reaches into your pocket and takes your
wallet away he had no right to do that but once he's done it you can't
legitimately use force to take it away from him so it's somewhat Kantian view
there that you see and then if you did use force and got it away from him then
And he couldn't do anything about it. So I don't think it's a contradictory view, but
it's at least paradoxical. So what I've tried to show so far is that, although there are
points one can criticize in Kant, he's quite, much of what he says is quite compatible with
classical liberalism. And when I turn, we turn now to the other person I want to talk
about the Hegel, matters are a bit different. Hegel was definitely not a classical liberal.
I want to read one of the people who was one of the most anti-Hegelian of all
philosophies was Arthur Schopenhauer, a somewhat younger contemporary. Schopenhauer,
when he was actually, Hegel was on his doctoral examining committee, got through the exam all right,
but then he scheduled lectures at the same time as Hegel, was the most popular philosophy professor,
no one came to Schopenhauer's lectures, so he had a grudge against Hegel ever afterwards,
but he had a description of Hegelian philosophy I'd like to read. If some of you
Hagel, installed from above by the powers that be, is the certified great philosopher,
was a flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan who reached the pinnacle of audacity
in scribbling together and dishing up the craziest mystifying nonsense.
This nonsense has been noisily proclaimed as immortal wisdom by mercenary followers and
readily accepted as such by all fools who thus join into as perfect a chorus of admiration
as had ever been heard before. The extensive field of spiritual influence with which Hegel
was furnished by those in power has enabled him to achieve the intellectual corruption
of a Whole Generation.
His enthusiasm for Hegel was rather contained.
We'll see to what extent he was justified in his views on Hegel.
Hegel lived from 1770 to 1830.
He became a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, which had been established
early in the 19th century. His main work on politics is called The Philosophy of Right,
which came out in 1821. It was based on lectures he'd given on politics over many years. And
He wrote other essays on politics. He had an early essay on the German Constitution in constitutional reform.
His last essay, in fact, was a criticism of the English reform bill of 1832.
I've always wondered how Hegel wrote this essay criticizing the English reform bill of 1832,
as he died in 1831, actually the bill was in discussion quite a bit before it was passed,
so that was what he was writing about.
The basic principle, Hegel in the philosophy of right, I should say before I go into the
I'll just say a few words about Hegel's general philosophy, which is extremely difficult to understand.
The real point of Hegel's philosophy, I think we can grasp, perhaps, if you recall something I said when I was talking about Aristotle.
Remember, Aristotle thought that substances have natures, and everything has certain essential properties, the properties that make it what it is.
And some substances don't fully achieve their essence immediately.
Say, an oak tree starts off as a seed, and then there's, in the Aristotelian view, there's
a process of growth that's guided by its end, by what its end, in fact, the full development
of its nature, and this guides its growth until it achieves its full nature.
So what Hegel really did was say this view applies to the entire universe.
We should take the entire universe as a single substance that has, whose nature is to be
completely rational.
So the entire world would become really the absolute mind or God.
I'm not going to go into whether we should say this process takes place in time or not.
That's a very controverted issue, but what we see is that Hegel thought there was a process
by which mind or spirit is constantly becoming more and more realized in history.
So, imagine the world is a gigantic syllogism. It's reason-enacted. Now, what Hegel was trying
to do in his basic, even his political philosophy, was this. He said that a problem that people
have, remember, here's another philosopher who was influenced by Rousseau. Remember when
I was talking about Rousseau on the Discourse on Inequality and Discourse on Arts and Sciences
where he criticized the division of labor. He said people were alienated from the world.
They think that they don't fully contain lives by themselves. They're in opposition to other
and other people that are dependent on others, so they don't have, they're not happy anymore.
What Hegel wanted to do was, he felt that in his political philosophy, in philosophy
of history, he wanted to show, the main theme is reconciliation, he wanted to show how we
could view the world in a certain way, or even if bad things happen, we can see these
He says rationally required so we can be reconciled to them in his famous sentence in his philosophy,
so-called double sentence, what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.
So he's saying reason is not some abstraction apart from the world, we know it's present
in the World, and also what is in the world is reasonable.
We don't, it's not fully evident how it's reasonable right away, but this is coming about
more and more.
We'll see, Hegel thinks, as history goes on, we see how the world is becoming more and
more reasonable.
And Hegel says in the foreword to the philosophy of right, he says that it's foolish for a
philosopher to try to come up with some ideal system that people should do.
He said philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought, so what he's going to do is not
come up with some kind of revolutionary scheme that will overthrow things that he wants to
to explain why the existing state of history is the one that reason requires.
So people, if they accept this, will be reconciled to the world.
Now, in carrying out this program, he follows this famous dialectical method.
This is where he gets his part that's hard to understand.
What he does throughout his work, he'll start with a certain category, and then he'll show, or claim to show, there's something incomplete about that category, so it will somehow go into its opposite.
not necessarily the logical contradictory, but somehow there'll be another side of the new concept will be something opposed to the first concept.
And then there's another stage where there's a union of these first two stages and then somehow this higher concept really takes both the previous ones into account while modifying them.
Sometimes people refer to the Hegelian Triad. You've sometimes heard this. People say thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Hegel really doesn't use those terms very much. That's more to be found in Fichte, a somewhat earlier German thinker coming between Kant and Hegel.
But Hegel certainly has this concept, regardless of this way of doing things, regardless of whether he uses a term or not.
So, in political philosophy, what Hegel does, and this is where he gets into the reasoning to his anti-classical liberalist position,
And why I think one's justified calling him an enemy of liberty is that he starts off
with a certain concept that seemed quite compatible in many respects with classical liberalism,
but then they're overcome by the contrary, by the next concept, and Hegel claims that
the truth in the early concept has been taken up in the higher concept, but in fact it's
really cancelled.
I should say one other thing I should have mentioned. When you get the new concept, I said you have the first concept, then there's the contradictory one, the opposing one, I should say, then there's the synthesizing concept, then you start the triad again.
Hagel calls this one where the old synthesizing concept becomes the new start, the new try,
calls this a collapse into immediacy because we're looking at the concept and the first
time is combining two concepts, now you're viewing it as kind of a single concept, there's
going to be a new opposition to that.
Now I must say I find this somewhat incomprehensible. I think for once the fault is not in my exposition
of it but with the actual philosophy itself. But now to get now to what Hegel does in philosophy
The work is in three sections. The first one is called abstract right. This is the one that's compatible with classical liberalism.
Here, Hegel says, he's asking, remember the theme is philosophy, how does reason or spirit,
geist, manifest itself in the world? Well, he says, it's reasonable to take spirit first
as manifest itself in individual human beings. So, if you have, say, an individual person,
One way the person can try to make the world rational is to impose his will on the outside
world.
So if you have, say, I'm a human being, I have a mind, so by imposing my will on lifeless
In this matter, I'm an instance of the growth of reason in the world, and how do I do this, according to Hegel, is by appropriating property to myself.
So, Hegel says, property has to, what he says, you have, the individual is, can seize property, just takes over land, and it becomes his.
So, Hegel is in favor of property rights and he says at the same time that one can't seize other people if you seize someone else, try to appropriate him and claim him as your property, that would be illegitimate because to exercise your reason properly, you must exercise your reason on something that doesn't have reason, on an inaction
and because of this, he says slavery is never justifiable. He criticizes the ancient Greeks, who were usually very fond of allowing slavery. He says this is never justifiable.
Now, so far he sounds pretty good. Now, he goes on from there to, say, talk about contracts in a fairly standard way.
He says that if people value own property, then they can have exchanges, and he describes various kinds of contracts.
Then he said, well, what happens if people don't observe the contract, probably violate the contract, then we can have a justifiable punishment of people for violating the contract.
And here is where he starts to get into some of the material that's a bit very questionable.
He says we could distinguish what kind of violations can we have, we can distinguish
ones where people really want to observe the law properly, don't want to violate anybody's
ethical obligations, but they just make a mistake about things.
I suppose I think that you claim I owe you some money, and I think I really don't, I've just made a mistake, I do so I don't pay you, so then you consume me for the money, but I haven't, I'm not ethically at fault unless I was very negligent in thinking that I didn't owe you the money, because I just made a mistake.
Then he said, well, we can take cases of fraud where I'm deliberately doing something against the contract, but I'm not repudiating the whole notion of law altogether.
And then he thinks of more severe crimes where, say, if I use violence against you, then I'd be saying, in effect, that there shouldn't be a system of laws at all.
So, there, he said, this is typical, typically, he says, this is something like an infinite negative judgment.
He says it's like, S is not P, infinitely negative.
What that's supposed to mean, I couldn't really say, but that's what he says.
So now, what happens if someone acts in this very bad way?
Then Hegel says he can be punished, and here he claims that by punishing the person who
committed a crime in this sense, you're annulling what he's done. Supposing, say, it's very
hard to see why Hegel thinks this. Supposing, say, I can't resist the temptation to hit
somebody over the head and take money from him. I do that and then I'm sent to prison
for a long time. Then this is certainly bad for me, but it's not clear how that annuls
what the crime, but Hegel thinks that it does, that somehow the punishment renders what the
criminal has done a nullity. It makes it as if it had never happened. I think much more
If we look at Aristotle's view when he talks about corrective justice, because what Aristotle says is when someone has violated someone's rights, when it's done something wrong, what you're supposed to do is restore the previous situation.
If, say, I stole money from you, then I have to give it back to you, so we get to the previous situation, but it isn't that in giving you back the money, I've annulled what I've done, it's just that it's your money, so a just situation is one that restores what it was before, but that isn't the way Hegel views it.
and he goes further he says that the criminal himself should accept this he
should take into his own mind his own will that he should be punished so that
he can annul what he's done. Now this leads us to the second section of
and Philosophy of Right, which deals with personal morality.
And here, what Hegel is really doing is making a criticism of Kant's approach to ethics.
Remember, Kant, as I mentioned, stresses the inner will, how it's not enough to act morally correctly to do the right thing.
You have to act from the intention of doing your duty.
Hegel agrees that people have to have the intention of doing their duty, but he says
this is too abstract a notion, because if you just say, I have to do my duty, it doesn't
have any content to it.
What am I supposed to do? I'm supposed to say I'm supposed to do my duty, but I don't know what that is.
There has to be someone, there has to be some way of saying what it is I'm supposed to do.
It isn't enough just to act according to pure will.
He says something like, I think in this section, the laurels of pure willing are barren leaves
that are never green. Pure willing doesn't achieve anything. It's just an empty abstraction.
He opposes what he calls morality for morality's sake. There always has to be some specified
content and it isn't enough for the specified content just to be something like a general
Max, and like Love Your Neighbors, Yourself, or anything of that kind, you have to have
specific content telling you what to do, and pure abstraction doesn't do this.
Now we get into, I think, one of the real areas where I think what Schopenhauer said
was justifiable, where Hegel gets really dangerous.
He said, one form of this stress on pure willing, which is, remember it's a stage that one goes through in getting to the growth of reason,
but it's one that he has a lot of criticism, is people will say they have to act according to conscience.
Suppose you think, imagine say, you get a, you're drafted into a war you consider unjust and you say, I can't obey that order because it would go against my conscience to do so, or you say, I think that I'm not going to follow, say, certain racially restrictive laws in the South.
in the South during the 1950s, because my conscience tells me these are bad laws, I'm
not going to do this. So, Hegel says, this is, if you say you should follow your conscience,
this is evil, you shouldn't follow what your conscience said, because if you do that, you're
You're just saying that morality is what I arbitrarily decide to be right, it's just
I think something is wrong, therefore I shouldn't do it.
And what happens if people adopt that attitude?
Then he says this is the identical attitude to the worst evildoer, because the worst evildoer
will say, I don't care what the conventions say, I'm going to do this. I don't care, say that, according to morality, I'm not supposed to murder anybody if I think, say, the Jews in Germany should all be got rid of, I'm going to do that.
So the evildoer would be saying, I'm going to act as my will dictates, and Hegel says,
this is exactly what following your own conscience amounts to. You're saying you're doing what
you think is right. So Hegel comes up with the repellent view that you ought not to follow
and how to control your conscience if it goes against customary morality.
Customary morality, not by coincidence, is the next section, the final section of the philosophy of right.
The German term that Hegel used, customary morality, is very important in his philosophy.
Zitlichkeit kind of means sort of a, oh I did it again, I always do that, it's customary.
All right, so it's that sort of a customary institutionalized form of morality.
We have certain, in a society, we have certain institutions that tell us what is the right thing to do.
Hegel thinks that this is an ethical substance that really exists.
It's not just an abstraction. It's not just, say, there's certain customs and institutions.
These are all unified, and so they form a substance, and people in following custom are sometimes unconscious,
very often unconscious of why the customs are in effect,
and he cites Antigone's statement that no one knows where the eternal laws come from,
But he thinks certain classes of people, probably philosophers such as himself, were able to bring to consciousness what the ethical substance is.
So in developing his view of the ethical substance, he again, as you would expect from Hegel, he goes into a triad.
And he starts off with the family and he holds, again, what he's talking about is ethical
substance.
It's sort of an institution that really exists apart, that is not just composed of the individual,
say the husband and wife, or not just two separate individuals, that would be going
back to abstract, right, the first stage we've already gotten through this.
So he says the husband and wife should be viewed as one person, they're one entity,
and the husband is the ruling entity.
In fact, he had a very low opinion of women's intelligence, and if, when he met, say, intellectual
women who would ask him questions about his philosophy, he would just switch the conversation
to something else or just brush them off.
So also he thought it's desirable because the family is an institution guiding individuals
what to do.
It's desirable that individuals not get married by their own choice but that parents arrange
people's marriages.
Children naturally should be very strictly disciplined and not allowed to exercise in
The second part of this stage, we're in the third part of the philosophy of right, the
one on customary morality, we're gone from the family, now we're into the next stage,
which is civil society.
Here, Hegel has some things to say that aren't so bad.
He's very much aware of the need for a division of labor and the market, and he realizes that
institutions can develop just on the market without requiring governmental control.
He favors individual property rights, he says, and he also says the law shouldn't discriminate
among people on the basis of religion. He said we shouldn't say something like, somebody's
a German or a Frenchman or a Jew, we should have everyone, the law applies to everyone
in the same way. So he does though, although he studied English and Scottish political
and Financial Economy.
He doesn't think that the market really will work in the way that the British economists
thought.
He had a sort of a pre-Keynesian view.
He thought that, actually a pre-Marxist view also, that the market would generate, if it
left to itself, a poor class of people, he calls this the rabble, who will not be able
to earn a living just on the pure free market. So some Marxists viewed Hegel as a precursor
to Marx in this respect in saying that the capitalism will lead to the class of people,
the proletariat, increasingly getting worse off. There's a book, a short book, by a French
in translation to English, Eric Weil, called Hegel in the State.
Notice, I didn't cover up what I wrote this time.
So, Hegel then allows, as you say, has some, gives some place for the market,
although it's a subordinate place and one the government can rule.
Now we get to the key part, the third part on the state.
This is, remember, we're still in the section on customary morality.
Now, he says that the state is the divine idea on earth.
The state is the march of God on the earth.
So, really, in the state, really, we have the highest development of rationality before we get to the next stage of Hegel's system,
which I'm not going to be talking about today, our religion and philosophy, but so far, the state is the highest growth of rationality,
so people have to be completely subordinate to the state.
So remember, I mentioned before, he said people have individual rights and property rights.
It sounded all right, but he thinks if necessary, the state can overrule these because the state
is the incarnation of reason, and it's higher than individuals.
If an individual were to say, I'm not going to do what the state says, then he would be
going back to the mistake of following his own conscience, and he would be an evil person.
He ought to go along with the customary morality and do what the state orders.
When Hegel talks about the state, he doesn't mean a world state.
He thinks there are particular states, separate states, and it's necessary that a state,
for a state to exist, that it be in opposition to other states.
This defines it as an entity that faces other states, including possible enemies.
And going along with this, Hegel thinks that war is very often desirable, at least sometimes
because this helps people become less corrupt. When there's a war going on, people will be unified and be willing to sacrifice to protect the state.
and these ethical, ethical motives become dominant where in peacetime people become too much concerned with luxury and just living for themselves and so wars are from time to time necessary.
And he refers to one phrase to hussars as a type of knight. Hussars and shining sabers. He rather likes war.
Now, what kind of state does Hegel think is the best kind? He thinks that a monarchy is by far the best kind of state.
because in a monarchy, a monarchy expresses fully, more fully than other
types of states, the unity of reason. He thinks, supposing, say, I'm trying to
decide something, I have some important decision to make, and there are all
sorts of considerations on one side or the other, so I'm weighing up all the
and the pros and cons of something, deciding what to do, then there's a moment of unity
where I have to say, well, these are the one side, this is the other, now I've made my
decision, this is it. There's a sort of an act, a single act of will being the final decision.
So Hegel thinks this, the monarch is, represents this in the state, the monarch is a single
The person who's enacted all laws into being, the decision comes through him.
So if you didn't have a monarch, reason wouldn't be fully in effect.
You wouldn't have this parallel with human reason, in the way I've explained.
But this doesn't mean the monarch is absolute or can do anything he wants.
Quite the contrary, the monarch is constitutional, and all he really does is ratify what the other parts of the government have done.
His key role is just, he is the focus of unity for the whole state.
Hegel thought there should be a legislature, but this would not, a bicameral legislature, two houses, but this would not be one where people would vote, as we do, for representatives.
But there would be, there were estates, such as the agricultural estate, there were other estates in the kingdom,
meaning the sort of classes of people that were worthy of representation, and these would be represented separately.
So you wouldn't have people voting for particular people, there would just be certain groups like groups of businessmen or groups of farmers and these would have representation.
It's very much along the lines of what was later put into effect in the Italian fascist government corporatism.
In fact, the foremost philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile, was a very ardent Hegelian.
So he got some of the ideas for what he wanted from Hegel on this point, so we have a corporate representation.
There's also, and this is one of the most important things Hegel said, there's a bureaucratic class that Hegel placed a great deal of stress on
government administrators who would be, bureaucracy would be impartial and be
enact reason by being impartial. This would be much more, it would be much more important than
the people because although Hegel thought the government should be aware of public opinion,
It should also, if necessary, treat public opinion with contempt.
Now, in the last section, last chapter of Philosophy of the Right,
Hegel is on the development of history, and Hegel now says it's not only do we have particular states that exist at a time,
At each time in history, one state will be the most important, the reason will be present in one state rather than another.
He has a whole scheme of things where you start off with the Orient where only one man, mainly the ruler, is free, everyone else isn't free.
and you have a development of freedom, at least, freedom in his sense, going throughout history.
There's a Greek stage in which you have independent sources of consciousness.
And it's interesting, in his treatment of the Greeks, he placed a great deal of stress
on that the Greek cities were guided by oracles in making important decisions.
This is extremely important for some reason.
And then he goes on, he describes the Roman world, and he thinks here there is a separation between individuals and what the state is doing, so individuals just think of what they should do in an inner way, they don't carry out their views of what's ethically proper into action.
discusses the Stoics here and then the highest stage so far is the Germanic
world. By the Germanic world he means not just Germany but all of Western Europe and
he thinks this is where reason has ended, the highest stage of reason so far. I'll
I'll just end with one story that involves this point on the Germanic world.
There was a proposal one time, I think in the 1950s, that Karl Popper, who was a very
strong opponent of Hegel, should be appointed to a chair at the University of Chicago.
So Leo Strauss, who was a professor, was very, very much opposed to this, and he wrote to
Eric Vogelin, who was another very famous historian of philosophy. He said, can you
tell me what's your opinion of Karl Popper? Popper, I mean, Vogelin wrote back, he said,
The Germanic world, Hegel means Germany, can you imagine anything like that?
So then Strauss replies to him, thanks very much for your letter, you've done a tremendous
Good. Now we've been able to get rid of pauper. So I just thought that would be an appropriate story to finish the lecture. So all right, we'll now have any, we have a little time for questions. Rodney.
The question was, some people have suggested that there is an aspect of Hegel that could be taken in a libertarian way,
specifically in the phenomenology in the famous section on the dialectic of master and slave, where it's, although the master is first dominant, then the slave is really, gets the upper hand because the master is parasitic on him, and then the consciousness really develops through the slave, not the master, so I think it's right that one could, and Hayek goes on to say how,
We get the notion of mutual recognition here. I think it's right that one could see this in a
take, get a libertarian view of this, but that's not what Hegel did with it. He developed, he
didn't say, well, okay, now we're, well, he did say we shouldn't have, he definitely did say,
and I mentioned we shouldn't have slavery and we should all have individual rights, but then this
We can get that to that stage. If we stop there, then that's perfectly fine. But then remember, Hayek wanted to go further, and then these individuals are transcended by the state, you know, they have to be subordinate to the state.
So I think you're right that you could get to libertarian inclusion if, say, you just
toss out parts two and three of philosophy of right, stay with the section on abstract
right.
That would be a good thing, too.
I should mention also, of course, the great book on this is by Kougev, Alexandre Kougev,
on Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
He was the one who really stressed that section of phenomenology.
Matthew.
I probably don't have the same expertise or cable that you need to do that for me.
I brought in some cable.
You kind of mentioned that he had like, I know there's a book called Philosophy of History,
but we might cover the same themes in another place.
But in any event, you kind of pointed out that his idea of the evolution of reason was that,
okay, in the oriental world, the
The question was, I mentioned in my talk something about Hegel's philosophy of history where there's
and his development of reason from starting with the Orient going to the Western Europe as it existed in his time.
And he points out that Hegel said that Africa is a completely dark continent. There's no reason at all there.
And what is the consequence for Hegel's philosophy in considering Africa in that way?
Well, I think if Hegel had been, of course remember at that time, Hegel was very dependent on what the historical material available to him was.
So, he wasn't claiming, he was just dealing with what he had to go on.
I think if he'd known more, if it wasn't people started studying African civilization
or American civilizations, say, the Incas and Mayas in Central and South America more,
then I think you wouldn't be able to take such a linear view of things, just say, this
This is all that reason is you have to have a more pluralistic view and I think philosophies
of history you had more material to work on such as Oswald Spengler did have a more pluralistic
conception although Spengler didn't say anything about Africa either but I mean I think you
know you could extend that and bring more you would just not be able to have such a
view.
It's interesting you mention that because Eric Vogel, remember the one I had, the funny
letter on Hegel, in his philosophy of history, he had to develop it. He thought that he'd
started off with kind of a linear system in his great work order in history, which he
planned to have in six volumes. He found he couldn't carry it out when he learned more
or about other civilizations. In volume four, and he changed his organization plan, in volume
four, called the Ecumenical Age of Vogel and System, he has a non-linear system. We have
all sorts of different civilizations going on at the same time. Well, I think we're out
of time now, so thanks very much.